Stable Cleaner
If there was ever a job that warranted the title "Professional Pooper Scooper", this is it. Sure, there are other responsibilities that come with attending to a horse's stall; changing the hay, feeding them, taking them out to trot. But, prime among these responsibilities or even a job of its own depending on which stable you work at, is the task of shoveling unthinkable amounts of feces from the horse stables.When horses use the restroom, they leave alot of evidence, and the evidence itself is large and potent to the nostrils. You likely have grown up around animals and have a passion for horses if you are doing this job, and a large part of your reward is likely the fact that you get to ride the horses in your down time.
But for us cat and dog lovers, it is hard to imagine getting paid practically a slave-wage to shovel our pet's poop on a daily basis for the "privilege" to walk them or take them to the park. This is what separates horse lovers from notorious animal caretakers, as horses require an extreme amount of care, money, and dedication, and the size of their bowel movements can be seen as a metaphor for the service they require.
There are legitimate health concerns that come with handling feces, whether from the diseases in excrement itself or the insects that are attracted to it, but most people see the more obvious reason why this job would be last on most people's dream job lists.
Meter Maid/ Mall Cop
When most of us see the faux-policemen riding down the street in their 3-wheel ticket-mobile looking to write up anyone who is even a minute over their allotted meter time, blood-boiling images of Paul Blart on his segway pop in our heads. These officers of the law strike many of us as some of the pettiest, most insignificant employees we have come across in our life, rarely compromising with the cash-strapped college student or the mother-of-two who got stuck in the store for an extra 10 minutes because her child was sick.Most mind-numbing of all is most meter maids' complete inability to have a sense of humor about the job they do, and for this reason being identified as a meter maid means being cast in an all-too-true stereotype of dweebishness that most people are not willing to be associated with. This is not a breed of government employee that those living in rural or even non-metropolitan areas have to deal with often or at all, but there are ample city dwellers who will attest to the maddening affect one no-tolerance meter maid can have on an entire neighborhood.
As if the name is not humiliating enough, their appearance in a cramped 3 wheeled vehicle, often wearing helmets or protective gear and a flamboyant vest is enough to replace the clown as entertainment at a 6-year old's birthday party. You have to guess that they are the intern of the police family too, equivalent or below the cop directing traffic as some sort of disciplinary measure in terms of humiliation.
Unlike some of these jobs that are terrible only because of the work they entail, this is mostly awful because of the reputation that comes with having the job. Most people of legal driving age know the feeling of relief that comes with being let-go by a reasonable cop who decided you had learned your headlight-induced-lesson without the need for a financial penalty. You leave the interaction with a pep in your step, optimistic at the pragmatic possibility for policeman with the ability to think for them self, not blindly abiding by the letter of the law. And then the meter maid hits you with a 50 dollar ticket for running 2 minutes over your allotted time, and your view of the police as more of a punitive force rather than a protective one is right back intact. Thanks Paul Blart, Meter Maid.
Embalmer
Let's take a trip into the morbid side of employment, because even serial killers need a day job. Many people go to medical school and decide they do not have the nerve tolerance for the high-stress nature of conducting potentially life threatening surgeries and decide that working with the already deceased is a safer career choice.The problem with this is that dead bodies are alot more putrid, creepy, and tough to look at than living ones, but this is the trade-off an embalmer makes when he chooses to use his medical expertise for preparing the dead for their funeral or other purposes. Because the dead require less urgent care and we as a society put much more importance on preserving a life than a corpse, embalmers do not have the luxury of a lucrative paycheck like doctors.
Their average salary of $19,000-$51,000 a year means that the job of embalmer does not carry with it a huge financial incentive, a fact that sheds those who choose to do this job in a creepier light. Embalming involves the preservation of human body parts in certain agents and fluids that maintain them until the body is to be presented at a showing. The embalming process eliminates some of the ghastly smells we associate with dead bodies, but the aroma in an embalming room would be described as less than pleasant.
The bottom line is that it takes a unique type of person to essentially play many peoples' version of Fear Factor everyday without the cash prize waiting at the end.
Bathroom Towel Dispenser/Attendant
There are few jobs in the world that feel more truly unnecessary than the bathroom attendant. More to show that a restaurant or venue is way more fancy than you can afford than to actually dispense towels, dry hands, or give out mints, the bathroom attendant has one of the least pleasant work environments known to man.I rarely cross these employees of luxury, but I would imagine that when a recession or economic downturn hits, these guys are the first to get the pink slip. It is not a physically laborious or mentally rigorous job, but even standing can be a painful task when you are in a room whose sole purpose is to facilitate the passing of human waste.
Say you have a terrible sense of smell and you think you can endure standing in a bathroom all night, and you are considering this job? Think again, because it is not just the spine tingling smells that you have to endure, but the all-encompassing awkwardness that comes with your actual job description. There are few things in life more awkward than making eye contact unintentionally in a bathroom while another man is trying to take care of his business.
As a bathroom attendant, you not only have to do this, but you often have to dry the hands of the man you know for a fact just touched parts of himself that you want no part of. If that doesn't leave you screaming in the night dreading your next arrival at work, I'm not sure that you are psychologically with it. This is one of the jobs with the lowest security, least opportunities for advancement, and highest potential for uncomfortable interaction. Those three facts alone make this a worthy candidate for Worst Job of the Year.
DMV Employee/ Driving Test Administrator
There aren't many words that can induce pure terror with just a mention of their syllables, but a 3 letter acronym has been causing panic attacks for years: DMV. The Department of Motor Vehicles is the notoriously poorly run government agency in charge of issuing licenses, administering drivers tests to get a license, and dealing with issues related to suspect use of a car. If you have a 5 minute errand to run at the DMV, you better not schedule anything within 2-3 hours of your arrival, just to be safe.The lines are always long, the employees surly almost without exception, and the people who have to visit the DMV, with the exception of the 16 year old getting his first license, are usually in some sort of trouble and are not happy to be there. All of these factors make the tension and misery in the air at your local DMV palpable, and it is suffocating even for those with the smallest amount of time spent in the building.
I do not even want to imagine what it would be like to be immersed in this environment on a daily basis as an employee of the Dept. of Motor Vehicles. We do not know whether the chicken came before the egg or vice versa, and it is hard to tell whether DMV employees are inherently crabby or if years of verbal abuse at the hands of people who have had their licenses revoked because of road rage incidents turned them that way.
Either way, it is clear that riding in the passenger seat with nervous 16 year olds while they hit speed bumps like they were Evel Knievel's ramp over the Grand Canyon is not the best way to put a smile on your face. Government employees often feel very little ability to get promoted without seniority, and this can be a stifling notion to a young, ambitious employee.
Modest salary of $23-30,000 make this one of the least attractive jobs in the country in spit of high job security.
Grave Digger
"Grave digger, when you dig my grave, will you make it shallow so I can feel the rain?" If you listen to Dave Mathews' song of the same name, you realize just how depressing the job of the man who digs holes in the ground daily for the deceased must truly be.If you have ever dug a whole of any significant depth, you know that after you remove the initial soft Earth, the deeper layers are more rock than soil, a fact that any digger of ditches is all too familiar with.
There are many factors that make this job all around miserable; a monotonous task (digging), repeated incessantly with seemingly little fulfillment unless you really enjoy digging. The men that choose this life surely have more blisters that have bulged, popped, and healed over the years than we can imagine and calluses like rocks, but it is the mental aspect of the job that has to be most grating.
Whether or not the grave digger observes the funeral, they are aware that every hole they dig is destined for a soul that has already passed on. I have never met a grave digger and am not going to play Dr. Freud, but I would imagine constant theme of mortality in one's job could have a profound effect on one's daily outlook. Considering a digger can make as little as $16,000 annually depending on their amount of work and place of employment, it is not exactly a job that high school and college graduates are clamoring for.
Like a mortuary employee, it takes an especially tough and strong minded person to work as a grave digger, and this type of work is not for the rosy-minded.
Construction Worker/Roofer
Even when the housing and general construction industry is booming, being one of the manual laborers who put in the backbreaking hours to make building ideas into realities is not a glamorous job.Depending on your place of employment, you could find yourself spending hours in the Florida or Arizona heat laying tiles or roofing on a tar undercoat that does nothing but attract more heat, wishing that you had not partied away your Freshman year in college. Or, if you're lucky, you may find a more mild climate in which to be employed on a construction crew, in which case you will still have the responsibilities of handling heavy, possibly dangerous equipment, dealing with the chronic pain that comes with daily heavy-lifting, and you must do it all while raking in a very modest wage.
With the average salary for a roofer being $34,220, one with a wife and family cannot be satisfied with his wage's ability to feed even an average sized family, and the reality is that many construction workers are in their line of work because manual labor is their only legitimate option.
On top of these detracting factors, the housing market is still recovering at a snail's pace, not inspiring news for hundreds of thousands unskilled laborers who previously made their living in construction but were crowded out because of practical halt in construction of new homes of late. But what about natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, don't they provide plenty of relief opportunities for construction workers?
Yes, but like many of the jobs available today, these are temporal, and in the time between disasters there are far fewer steady jobs than in the fairly recent housing boom. The problem with construction,too, is that it is a nationally-repressed industry, and there is no oasis for new housing that these guys can migrate to in the direst of times. Construction is down nationally, and a job that was always undesirable because of danger, thankless work, and conditions has become more competitive and low-paying than ever.
Customer Service Representative
The Notorious B.I.G. once stated that with more money comes more problems, and that is often the case. But if Biggie ever wanted to have some real problems, he could sign up doing a job intended to solve the shortcomings of others all day. This is basically the life of a customer service representative, the lackeys who take the brunt of the anger for their employers' dysfunctional product.With a modest average salary of $33,600, many IT and customer service employees find themselves questioning their career choice fairly quickly. First of all, imagine a job where the average caller has already spent upwards of an hour fiddling with the problem, working themselves into a huff, and calling up more to vent their anger than anything else. This is not a good place to start, and it does not help that a vast majority of callers are elderly or completely incompetent themselves, so employing elementary ways to communicate explanations for complex technology becomes a job in itself.
People who have taken the time to master a craft or product to the extent they are able to explain its in's and outs can find this process very unfulfilling. When the call is over, the Customer Service Rep has solved someone else's problem and lept through hoops to do it, only to sit and wait for the next demanding caller. It can be a viciously frustrating cycle and it has driven many a well meaning tele-helper to insanity.
Divorce Lawyer
This is not a judgement of the work they do, just our opinion about the potential pitfalls of the job. If you've read up on the essential Law and Order episodes there's no doubt you have seen a classic bitter divorce turned homicide turned great primetime television. And, without exception, the divorce lawyers are absolute bulldogs who seemed to turn the separation into sport.Nearly every divorcee sees their life altered in some form because of the experience, and it is almost always in a negative capacity. For one's job to require immersion in one nasty divorce proceeding after another must have a grating effect at some point.
Just watch Kramer v. Kramer to get the worst case scenario that too often ensues in courtrooms, and to choose that mayhem as a daily undertaking indicates that you might have some Tony Soprano in your spirit. In all seriousness, its a nasty business and even though it pays nicely, you need a strong stomach, thick skin, and a little mean streak to do this job.
